Non-serial voting corrected

Question

Yes, it's good that we have scripts to reverse serial voting and when they don't work, I usually flag one of my own posts for moderator attention so that they can escalate. But just now, I got a rather strange one:

That's only a single upvote and by definition it can't be serial. Either the script forgot the rest of the upvotes, or it's a little too trigger happy this evening.

(I'm aware that suggested edits are votes too, and that this could pertain to five of them, but AFAIK only serial up- and downvotes are reversed.)
(I'm also aware that with my reputation level I should not care about 10 points, but this could also happen to users for which it does matter.)

Answer 1

Technically speaking, the entry is correct. There was a mass invalidation that occurred on several sites of our network. It was not a normal invalidation in the sense of a user was targeting a specific user. This user had been casting massive amounts of votes on sites across the network, sending out their full 40 votes every day in the span of a minute, in an effort to chase gold badges.

All of those votes that were determined to be "scripted" for the purpose of obtaining badges were invalidated. They are all marked as invalidated like any other invalidated vote in the system because we do not have any other way of marking a vote as invalidated.

As far as I know, this is the first time we have ever invalidated votes in such a way. We would normally just delete their profiles to invalidate all the votes, in which case a bunch of users would all see a series of "User was removed" history entries instead. If we choose to continue using this process to invalidate mass voting sprees like this, we will find a way to clarify this possible case in the help center.

Answer 2

There are currently three reasons you'll see "Serial voting was reversed":

• Classic serial voting reversal, where one user voted too much on a single user's posts within a short time frame. This can be pretty distinctive since there may be a lot of votes being reversed at once (though I believe that in some circumstances it's not so many, maybe even as few as three).
• Scripted voting reversal, as mentioned in the other answer by animuson. This happens when staff decides that someone was gaming the system (usually to get badges), using what has to be automated voting, but they've posted enough that their account shouldn't be deleted outright. It's rare, but this type of reversal has been done on multiple occasions. Usually this is a single vote that's being reversed. Sometimes it's more than one, depending on how active you were during the period the voting was taking place.
• Double voting reversal. In some cases, it is possible for the same user to vote more than once on the same post. Generally, this happens when two profiles who've both voted on the same post are merged, but this can also happen if the user exploits a race condition. As of June 2022, there is a script to reverse these votes. This means that if a user voted more than once the same post, all those votes except one would be reversed. More details at A post so nice, I upvoted it twice (actually, 10 times)!.